I would like to purchase a 4-6 axis industrial robotic arm with 3 to 6 kg payload and in the $50K range. Is there ROS support for any from the major manufacturers, e.g. Kuka, Fanuc, ABB, Motoman, or Denso? Even Linux support would be acceptable and I could develop the ROS software myself.

What is the application or rather how complex is it and what function of the robot controller do you need?

In my application i only need to tell the robotic arm which pose it has to move to and retrieve status values for joints/currentPose/forceValue.

It is probably not a very good solution. At least it is a simple one;). I'm using a tcpConnections to my arm which sends Pose values and gets the status values. This would probably applicable to most other arms that support tcp sockets.

Btw, I’m using a Universal Robot.
Unfortunately it's payload is limited to 5 kgs. However the price is definitely less 50k.

Comments

Actually that might be a very suitable arm. I haven't heard of this company or the UR5 before but it looks very interesting, is it available in North America? Do you have any source code available or a project page describing your own work with it?

I don't think that Universal is selling arms in the US yet (lacking regulatory certification). But I'm interested to hear how well it works, and would also like to see a pointer to the ROS integration code.

+Brian Gerkey I have word that certification is expected 'early 2012'. I feel like a lot of the cost of some of the arms are driven by precision/repeatability capabilities I don't require- I think the UR5/6 may be less repeatable than others but that's great for me if it brings the price down.

Unfortunately I don’t have any information online (yet) neither code nor project information, but I can contact you via email. Regarding the ros integration code, as I said, till now it is quite simple. My ROSNode just sends Pose Values to the UR through TCP/IP socket and the UR moves to that pose.

As I’m not using all of that fancy motion_planning stuff I’m not sure whether it makes sense to publish such a simple node. I know that the real leverage of ros in terms of hardware integration would be a lower integration of the UR(based on ROS motion_planning).